Stony Brook University Computer Science

Prof. Byungkon Kang has received a Starting Program Grant from the National Research Foundation of Korea to support his research on a project that aims to find an algorithm to answer the question 'what do these things have in common?'.  Prof. Kang gives the following description.

Given a collection of items, (such as photographs, books, sentences, etc.) we wish to devise a method to summarize those items in a human-understandable manner. For example, our current focus is on generating a summary sentence for a group of sentences/images of indeterminate number.

Identifying such common information from a collection is one of the properties that characterize intelligence, as it not only looks at superficial features but also at the fundamental representation of the items. To tackle this issue, we borrow various concepts from fields of mathematics and artificial intelligence. Besides text summarization of the given items, we also plan to investigate other applications of our problem. In particular we wish to see if popular data mining and machine learning algorithms can benefit from identifying common features of the given data."

The grant provides funding from late 2022 to early 2025.